I’m sitting here in the lobby of my hotel in South Beach and trying to process these last few days. As busy as this trip has been, the last few days, coming as they have at the end perhaps, have been physically - and emotionally - exhausting.

An explanation.

Atlanta was in a hectic mode when I was there because of the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament. It is a city of traffic anyway. But when I was there it was even more hectically crowded - as my hotel was - with hopped-up, hoop-loving packs of heterosexual men hoping that their favored proxies of masculinity would prevail on the hardwood. Even I - non-heterosexual, non-hopped up, but loving those proxies of masculinity with equal fervor - have always wanted to be at an NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament. I just didn’t realize that when I finally made it to the same city at the same time as one, it would be for a reading of a book I had written. It was an odd feeling knowing that almost everyone in the city was focused on the final game the Monday night I read at the Borders Buckhead store. There in a corner of that store was a small oasis of gay men and a couple of middle-aged women who had come to hear me read. It dawned on me: I was their proxy, yet we were all on the same team. We all wanted to prevail. That’s what the book has proven to me. My pain, my surviving of it, my ability to observe and laugh at the absurdity in the midst of it all, is specific to the story I have to tell, but there is a commonality I have been witness to from my side of the podium as I read from my book and talk afterwards with those of you who are showing up. These readings - this blog - is a gathering place for those of us who need to gather. One of the gay guys gathered there in Atlanta was sitting on the back row. He was a very cute college kid. Very cute. I noticed he was with one of the middle-aged women. When they came up for me to sign the woman’s book after the reading and discussion period, she told me she was his mother. I signed words to this effect for her inside her book: For someone who knows the power of maternal love. Mississippi Sissy, as much as being about the coming of age of a little gay boy, is also a book about just such power. (In fact, I was just asked to read at Women and Children bookstore in Chicago on May 3rd so watch for me there.) The mother in Atlanta then asked me to pose with her so her child could take a picture of us. When she stood next to me, she unbuttoned her shirt and displayed a PFLAG t-shirt she was wearing. Her son smiled broadly - he was even cuter when he smiled - and brought out a camera and flashed a couple of photos of us. “You really do know something about the power of maternal love, judging by that smile on your son’s face,” I told her. He lowered the camera. His smile broadened. “She sure does,” he said. “I’m so lucky to have her for a mom.” She buttoned her shirt. “I’m luckier to have him for a son,” she said. I watched them walk through the shelves of books at Borders back out into the parking lot and deeply missed my own mother, as I’ve missed her throughout this tour, as I missed her throughout the writing of my book, and wondered if she had lived would she have ever donned a t-shirt with those initials on it. She might not have, I determined, out of a sense of style but not out of a sense of shame. I made it back to the eerily empty hotel after the reading - all the other guests must have been at the game - in time to watch the announcement of the starting line-ups for Florida and Ohio State. Memories of my basketball coach father overtook those of my mother as I lay in the dark and watched dunk after dunk after dunk and drifted off to sleep. When I awoke I saw that the proxies from Florida had won. But it was those proxies of a happy family - that t-shirt wearing PFLAG mom and her fledgling man of a son - who will stay in my memory from my first experience of being in the same city as the championship game of a Final Four, especially when I watched Joakim Noah from the Florida Gators climb through the throngs of rabid fans in the stands after the game to find his own proud mother so he could hug her tightly and bury his crying, happy face on what appeared to be her always ready shoulder. At that moment, I cried a little too.

The next night I read at Outwrite bookstore and cafe in Atlanta. The staff there, headed by owner Phillip Rafshoon, could not have been nicer or supportive of me. Outwrite is an amazing store and I suggest you check it out if you’re ever in Atlanta and give them your business. We packed the place and afterwards I signed lots of books and met lots of nice and interesting people, including a woman, Sarah Jones, who had gone to school with my father and mother in Harperville, Mississippi, and, as happens at almost every reading I’ve done, told me she had seen my father play basketball. There were two other people there who told me the same thing at Outwrite. “To this day,” one older gentleman told me, “your daddy was the best basketball player I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen some great ones. He could put on a show. I once watched a whole team, when playing defense against his dribbling, go and sit on their bench, all of’em just giving up and letting him show off. The crowd went wild.” I guess I come by my showing-off honestly. Anyway, after the event Phillip took me over to E. Lynn Harris’s beautiful home in Buckhead where E. Lynn had, yes, gathereed some of his best friends for a party in my honor E. Lynn is one of the most generous men I’ve encountered in a long time. Thank you, E. Lynn, for opening up your home to me and hosting such a great party. It was interesting to be one of the few Caucasians in the crowd of beautiful African American men and women. It gave me an appreciation of how they must feel when they are in the minority in a crowd. But I have to say, I thought I had died and gone to heaven, as we say in the south - especially when I was talking to the ex-Indiana University football player who now models in Atlanta. E. Lynn knows how to assemble a guest list.

That party and the receptive customers at Outwrite were just what I needed to lift my spirits that night. My Amazon numbers - which I foolishly checked before heading out were not that good (up in the thousands) - and I had gotten a call from the managing editor of Allure magazine, where I am (was now) contributing editor with an offer of a new contract that I was not pleased with. It was odd being on the New York Times Bestseller List for the last two weeks (alas, I fell off this week because of Bill Bradley and Jerome Groopman selling lots of books, but I plan to claw my way back on with your help if you continue to spread the word about the book for I’m counting on the gathering - there’s that word again - force of our numbers out there to get me back on it) and then receiving a professional kick in the teeth like that. I decided on the ride to Outwrite that I wouldn’t accept the contract offer and take a leap of faith and see what unfolded in my life. It scares me to take this leap but I feel this is the universe pushing me forward in some way. The problem I’ve always had is trying to be the successful version of the idea I had about myself when I first moved to New York when I was 19 and a fledgling man myself and seeing my future self as a proxy of the dreams I had back then. I am now no longer a fledgling man, but a full-grown one and it’s time I started owning that. We can none of us be proxies for ourselves or even the idea we have of ourselves. We must BE ourselves. I must BE myself, more specifically, and this is not who I thought I would be at 51. But this is who I am. It is time to be this person and let success be the byproduct of a more evolved acceptance of myself. This tour and all the reaching out from you and to you has taught me that. I really do feel I am a different person after these intense three weeks on this part of my tour. No, I take that back. I feel as if the person who started the tour was the different person. This is now, simply, who I am. Thank you.

But that night in Atlanta, after the party, I couldn’t sleep because of the panic attack I was feeling in the middle of the night when my eyes flew open and I started wondering what if I never worked again and couldn’t pay the rent. I said a prayer. I took deep breaths. I prayed some more. But my heart continued to race. Finally, I got up and retrieved the video tape that my brother had made for me of an old PBS show in which Frank Hains was interviewing Eudora Welty back in the early 1970s when I knew them both. I had been lugging that tape around through the myriad airports I’ve been trudging through on this trip. I’ve kept it in a plastic bag along with my father’s baseball glove my sister gave me back in Vicksburg, the two objects the talismans I tend to touch when I’m waiting for my plane to take off and carry me to yet another city to meet more of you. I put the tape in the VCR in my Atlanta hotel room, the first VCR machine I’ve had in a hotel room so far. I had not seen Frank Hains in this way - alive there on tape, dapper, sweetly erudite - since I found him murdered over 30 years ago. He has only lived in my memory and in the writing in my book. It was oddly soothing to lay in the dark in that hotel room in Atlanta and let his voice and visage and Miss Welty’s lovely lilt wash over me as they discussed the musicality of her written language, their love of the south, the almost physical germination of her fiction, her hatred of electric typewriters. The spectral aspect of their continuing presence in my life was not only heightened by the flickering light of the television screen but also, as I closed my eyes and listened as they soothed me back to sleep, by a kind of lullaby formed by the loveliness of their voices alone, their ever well-chosen words, the comfort they could always give me by keeping my mouth shut and being completely still - stillness is an overlooked accomplishment in this world of ours - and listening to what they had to say, a kind of lullaby circling back to me all these years later to let me know that I would be okay if I continued to listen as they taught me to listen - yet again to them technologically conjured in the darkness in which I found myself and to my calming heart.

The next morning I got up and caught the Southern Crescent, a train that Miss Welty always liked to take to New York City when visiting her publisher and friends up north. I was taking it to Birmingham, however, for my next reading. On the train, for the four hours it took to get there, I was sitting in front of a woman and her small son. Again, a lullaby-like voice lulled me. The child was a talkative one and ended almost every sentence in a low, almost whispered word: Mama. “Look at me, Mama,” he would say. “See the pretty trees, Mama,” he said, pointing out the window at the spring greenery rushing by. Then, at one point, this: “Read to me, Mama.” Softly, she read aloud, as my own mama would read to me so long ago, from the grown-up book she had been silently reading while all his mama-entreaties had been aimed her way. It was from Anne Lamott’s new book Grace (Eventually). It was the essay titled Chirren. “What’s chirren?” asked the child. His mother explained as he cuddled next to her behind me and I heard the adult words “abortion” and “breeder” read aloud amidst all the innocent love that was in that essay about Lamott having her first child in her late 30s. I also heard a line about holding that child which was like holding a part of her soul. I heard the book close behind me when the woman finished that particular essay. “Can I hold it, Mama?” came her own child’s voice. At first I thought he meant a part of her soul, but then realized he was talking about Lamott’s book. “What’s this say, Mama?” he asked. His mother read aloud once more: “‘Where is the Life we lost when living?’ T. S. Eliot,’” which I later discovered at my reading that night when I picked up Grace (Eventually) to more closely peruse it, is the quote Lamott uses to open the book. Mother and child fell asleep on the train. As did I.

When I awoke, I was in Birmingham and an old college buddy of mine, Jan Dickson Hunter, picked me up and we had lunch at a barbecue place. Later than night I read at Books a Million at a tony mall outside Birmingham and had a great crowd. I don’t know if it was my exhaustion or my worry about my job situation or the emotional remnants of overhearing the mother-and-son intimacy behind me on the Southern Crescent, but by the end of my reading about going dressed as a witch for the Halloween carnival a couple of weeks before my own mother’s death when I was a little boy not much older than the one on the train earlier in the day affected me more deeply than usual. But I recovered at the Mexican restaurant later with Jan and a bunch of her gay friends and my first cousin’s gorgeous twenty-something lesbian daughter who goes to school in Birmingham. It was great to spend some time with such a lovely second-cousin. It’s the first time we had ever met. She’s a great kid and I hope she stays in my life. I guess it was my own maternal side making itself known.

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to catch a very early flight to Miami through Orlando yesterday. When I got here I walked around to some of my old haunts. (I owned a condo here for two years about five years ago.) I ate lunch at my favorite restaurant, Ice Box, on Michigan off Lincoln Road. Go in and say hello to its handsome owner Robert if you’re ever down here. Great food and great desserts. Even Oprah featured his cakes on her show. Dropped by Basics new furniture store back in the alleyway by Books and Books, the bookstore where I’m reading tonight at 8 p.m., to say hi to Steven and his boyfriend, Brian, who own that store, one of the hippest in town. Basics original store is still there, its a clothing boutique on the other side Books and Books. They were also my neighbors when I lived here. Their house has one of the most beautiful bogenvillia trees out in front of it and I used to love to sit in my living room and look out my front window at it. I also dropped by to see my old real estate agent who now has his own firm on Jefferson off Lincoln, Gary Hennes. And next to his office is Galerie, the chicest store in South Beach owned by the chicest woman, the gloriously German Regina. It was great to see all these old friends.

After sitting in Regina’s store and catching up with her I walked down to my old condo on Espanola and Meridian. I thought it would be fun to see what shape the building was in. I didn’t realize when I got there that the one memory that would surface the moment I stood there was the morning I got my HIV diagnosis. I was living in that condo when I got it. I rode my bike back to that corner from my doctor’s office, locked it up, and held myself together the whole ride until I got through the door. I then sat dazed for a few moments on my sofa. When I got up to go get a drink of water I felt my knees buckling and grabbed a wall in a corner and slid down on the floor and ended up in a ball where I sobbed for a long time. Back then, I honestly didn’t know how such a diagnosis would affect me - physically or mentally or emotionally or spiritually. In every one of those ways it has strengthened me. I didn’t know that though back then when I was balled up on the floor. I really thought I had received a death sentence. But isn’t that what we all receive the moment we are born and we are held, like parts of their souls, in our mothers’ waiting arms. I didn’t know back then that this, five years on, would be the Life I’ve found while I am living. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this life on this tour in this city at this moment I am typing these words about that memory. I looked away from that old condo of mine that held that long-ago corner where I was literally a ball of fear. The bogenvillia tree, beautifully in bloom, was once more in my line of vision. I stood - completely still - and fearlessly turned my back on that frightened proxy of myself five years ago whose fear - of happiness, of success, of my true self - had infected me long before any virus had. Some viruses may never be cured. But fear can be. The bogenvillia has always been beautiful.

I meant to post last night after my two appearances in Atlanta, but E. Lynn Harris had a wonderful party for me at his beautiful home in Buckhead and I didn’t get back to my hotel till late so I packed and tried to sleep and got up this morning at 6:30 a.m. in order to catch a train to Birmingham. Who catches a train outta Georgia to Alabama? Who else. Me. Folks last night at the party didn’t even know there was a train from Atlanta to Birmingham. So if you’re over in Birmingham reading this right now, come hear me read and let me sign a book for you at Books A Million at 757 Brookwood Village. I’ll be there at 7 p.m. tonight April 4th, God willin’ and the water don’t rise, as I heard somebody say last night about something else. That’s an old southern expression I hadn’t heard in years and just wanted to use it this morning myself.

In the meantime, you can go on Bookslut.com and read an interview with me about the book by Stephanie Merchant, someone who really understood what I was trying to do when I wrote it. It was just posted yesterday. Bookslut.com is a great site for book lovers and I am happy I was asked to be on it.

I’ll write more once at get across the state line.

About to go to bed here in my hotel room in New Orleans and wake up tomorrow to head off to Atlanta for two events. If you live there please come out and hear me read and let me sign a book for you. Check my blog for the exact addresses and times but I’ll be at Borders Buckhead on Monday night April 2nd (introduced by E. Lynn Harris) and at Outwrite on Tuesday night April 3rd. It should be fun. Looking forward to it.

Yesterday here in New Orleans I ran into my old buddy, Bobby Harling, the playwright and screenwriter (Steel Magnolias, etc.) and we had a nice lunch and caught up with each other. Then later in the day I signed books at Faulkner House Books located on Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter in the townhouse where Faulkner lived in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. When I had a pied-a-terre here in the late ’90s, I’d wander down that Alley almost every day and look through Faulkner House’s stalls and once even a generous buddy of mine - I could have never afforded it at that point in my life - bought me a first edition of Miss Welty’s A Curtain of Green short story collection I spotted there when we were strolling around. It is one of my most cherished possessions. It had always been a dream of mine to have a book sold at Faulkner House and to have one that I was able to sign there also was an added dream come true. We sold a lot of books in the two hours I sat back at the desk of the owner, the dapper and personable and literarily astute Joe DeSalvo. And if you’re ever in there yourself say hello to saleslady Joanne Sealy who reigns over the place in her sexy, effervescent way. She’s a hoot’n'hottie, as one of my uncles liked to describe his favorite type of woman. One of the customers who came in was a Mr. Frank Thiemonge from down around Mobile, Alabama, who had driven over to New Orleans with his lovely wife for the weekend. He had wandered into the store and told me he had seen me the week before on a morning Mobile television show when I was promoting my previous book signing over in Fairhope. Frank was what we’d lovingly call down in these parts a Good Ole Boy. He bought a book and asked me to pose for a picture his wife took of the two of us. “Ah’m a’gonna be proud t’put this picture between the two of me with Percy Sledge and Freddy Fender. Yessiree.” That was one of the best compliments I’ve gotten on the southern swing of this book tour. Thanks, Frank. And thank you, Joe, for having me in your legendary book shop.

Later last night I put on a tie and made my way over to the W Hotel in the French Quarter for a charity book signing event that my agent at CAA, Rich Green, had put together to benefit the rebuilding of the library post-Katrina at the Martin Luther King, Jr., High School. I got to meet and hang out with Donna Tartt (she’s as chic and beautiful as she is talented) and Michael Lewis and Mark Childress and Ace Atkins and Frank Turner Hollon and Christopher Rice. It made me feel like a real writer hanging with all those folks. Go to Amazon or your local bookstores and look up their works and buy some. They are all so talented and I was flattered to be included in that flock. Later, Donna and Mark and Christopher and I met up with director John Waters, who was in town to speak at the Tennessee Williams Festival going on this weekend, at a French Quarter dive almost as legendary in New Orleans as Joe DeSalvo’s bookstore. It’s a bar called the Corner Pocket. Let’s just say it is gloriously sleazy and an appropriate way to end a weekend devoted to the memory of Tennessee Williams since it was one of his favorite places to imbibe and, unembarrassingly, ogle the goods. What kind of goods? Let’s just say perhaps I should have spelled that “unem- Bare Ass - ingly.”

Today, Palm Sunday - Jesus What a Segue!,which kind of sounds like a title in-and-of-itself of a gospel song that Frank Thiemonge might have sung in four-part harmony with Percy and Freddy and me - Bobby Harling and I met up with a couple of friends for brunch after church. Our mutual pal, Vogue writer extraordinaire Julia Reed, a fellow Mississippian who four years ago married a handsome sweetheart of a local lawyer down here and is almost finished refurbishing a Garden District mansion directly across the street from Chris Rice’s mama’s old house, had been scheduled to usher at their local Presbyterian Church. So we all met up at a restaurant after the service in their neighborhood and had gumbo and fried oysters and laughed a lot. In addtition to all her Vogue work, Julia, an inspiration not only as a prose stylist but also for her proficiency, is working on a book about Katrina and New Orleans for Harpercollins and is then doing a collection of all her food columns that ran the New York Times Magazine for my editor at St. Martins, Michael Flamini. Check out her collection of essays, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomenon, as well as the introduction she wrote for the beautifully produced coffee table tome of artist William Dunlap’s work called Dunlap, an ironically succinct title for a book about such a charmingly loquacious fellow as Bill. I even ran into an old Jackson buddy, Patti Carr Black, at the restaurant during our brunch and hugged her neck. It’s been like old home week down here and I’ll be sad to leave tomorrow.

But leave I must. Can’t wait to meet all you folks over in Atlanta. Please come out and introduce yourselves to me. We’ll have a blast at my readings. And keep spreading the word about the book. I want to stay on the New York Times Bestseller List as long as possible. With your help, I plan on it. I don’t want to lose the traction I’m getting while out here on the road. And I’m still trying to navigate the shoals and currents at Amazon. So keep telling your friends to place their orders there as well. Now time to hit the sack and have another dream about my dog Archie. That’s been the hardest part of the tour: missing him. In another week I’ll be back in New York for a few days and can cuddle up with Archie as I go to sleep at night instead of the extra pillow in another hotel room’s misnamed double bed.

Howdy from Nawlins. I was going to say I’ve finally caught up on my rest after the nightmarish trip down here from Iowa City but I don’t think I’ll really be able to catch up on my rest this entire book tour. Book tours, I was warned by friends who have experienced them, are grueling. But it’s always been one of my dreams to be able to complain about a book tour at some point in my life - so I ain’t going to complain about being able to complain about this one. Aaahh - there’s an epiphanic koan (to mix my religious vocabularies) to commence the day in this most Catholic of southern cities: Complaint as Blessing.

A couple of days ago now I went out to the Jefferson Parish Library in Metairie to do a reading and signing. The library is quite beautiful and we had a good crowd. Jim Davis from the library - a better-looking Shelby Foote - introduced me. He’s got one of those southern accents so thick and deeply rooted in the region one expects to see moss hanging from it. I was so moved to meet several people who had already read my book and were touched by it in specific ways because it spoke to them about their own lives in the south. It’s been a humbling experience - I do mean that: I am humbled - when people come up to me at these readings to speak so intimately to me about their own lives and struggles and how they too have emotionally survived. My readers - a new term in my life that is another blessing, sure not complaining about that one - are a new source of inspiration and solace to me. I didn’t know when I started writing this book how much it would be a bridge for us all to reach out to each other - reader to writer, writer to reader, stranger to stranger, white folks to black folks, black folks to whites, family member to estranged family member, friend to friend, reader to potential reader, straight to gay, conservative Christian to Christians not so conservative …. Shit, I’ll stop the litany. I’m beginning to sound kind of corny. But I am kind of corny - always have been - beneath this urbane guise of mine. My old friend Andrew Sullivan (see my blog links over there) told a writer from Bookslut.com who just interviewed me for its April postings that beneath my urbane exterior, I’m “a Flannery O’Connor on acid,” that I’m a “one-off,” which in his British parlance and own one-offness is a compliment. I think part of that is my ability, still, to claim my corniness after living in a land of avenues and numbered streets where corniness is scorned. It’s something else I’m just not ashamed of.

After the reading at the library I went and had a delicious dinner at Meaux Bar on 932 Rampart Street in the French Quarter. The place is owned by a couple of buddies from New York who moved down to New Orleans a few years ago, Matthew and Jim. It’s a really cool restaurant with really cute waiters - hell, Matthew and Jim are really cute themselves. So if you want to see sexy guys and gals at other tables and flirt with the staff, head over to Meaux Bar when you’re in New Orleans. Matthew is the chef there and the food is great. They even have valet parking.

Yesterday I got up early and caught the train to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where my nephew Jake goes to school at the University of Southern Mississippi. When Jake came up for my book party in New York a few weeks ago, he couldn’t believe I hadn’t booked Hattiesburg on my trip because down a couple of blocks from his loft is a great place called Main Street Books run by a lovely couple, Diane and Jerry Shephard. I had St. Martins look into it as an adjunct to my New Orleans stop and I’m glad I did. We had a great turn out and I sold over 50 books there after my reading. It’s a beautiful store in downtown Hattiesburg. If you’re ever passing through that part of Mississippi, check it out. (There’s also a great little cafe in town down by the railroad tracks called SouthBound, owned and run by Chris Hackbarth, an ex-model who somehow landed in Hattiesburg. Chris is even from Iowa City, so we had fun talking about my stop there. Check out Chris’s bagels, so to speak, if you’re ever in Hattiesburg after buying a book from Diane.)

The range of people in my audience at Main Street Books surprised me - though I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by this tour. Each day brings new and welcome ones. We had a middle-aged preppy man-and-wife from Laurel. Gay men of a certain age from around southern Mississippi. Mothers and their children. And cool college students - some straight, some gay - from several of the colleges from around the area. I do think Mississippi Sissy, despite that second word in its title, can be a cross-over kind of book. And the audience in Hattiesburg helped prove that to me.

Finally, seeing some of those Mississippi college kids around the streets in Hattiesburg as well as the ones that came in to the store to buy my book, made me think of that Mississippi college kid I write about back in the 1970s in the last chapters of my book, the one that got in that Ryder truck and drove to New York City when he was 19. I hate writing about myself in the third person but looking back at that kid from the perspective of a 51 year old almost makes me seem like a different person in my own eyes and yet I know the basis of who I am today sitting here in this hotel room blogging was being formed then by the people who knew and loved me. One of those people, as you know if you’ve read the book already, is Carl Davis. A nice result of writing the book has been getting back in contact with Carl after all these years. Late last night, after Jake drove me back down to New Orleans, I signed on to my email and found this image from Carl. It is a photograph of me from those days in Mississippi when we first knew each other. For those of you who have complained that there are no pictures in the book, here’s one of me that Carl took when I was 18 or 19. My dear friend Peter Staley, the builder of this site as well as his own - aidsmeds.com (see links to the side) - said I should post it. I always do what Peter says. So here it is. It is the face I can’t help but see in the young people who come to meet me at my readings, a face I no longer see in the mirror but one that will always stare back at me from the past I’ve tried to conjur again in my book, a past that is now speaking through all our broken panes.

Publishers Weekly ran a starred review of my audio version of Mississippi Sissy this week. I spent five days back in the winter reading an abridged version of the book myself and getting in touch with my Juilliard School of Drama roots. It was exhausting but fun as well as artistically fulfilling. When Publishers Weekly puts a red star next to a review it means Attention Must Be Paid. So I’m paying attention. This is what it said:

Kevin Sessums, read by the author. Audio Renaissance, abridged, five CDs, 6 hrs., $29.95 ISBN 978-1-4272-0039-6
As an eight-year-old boy coping with the horrific loss of his parents and a nagging sense of being “different” from his peers in the Mississippi town of Forest, Sessums assumes the persona of What’s My Line panelist Arlene Francis. “Call me Arlene!” he insists, and his grandparents—despite their rather reactionary stances in the realms of politics, religion and sexuality—manage to lovingly comply. In performing his electrifying coming-of-age memoir, Sessums adroitly introduces the cast of characters who shaped his journey. The vocal renderings of such memorable figures as the family’s loving and devoted—as well as self-confident and determined—maid Matty May, who repeatedly recites “Poitier” as a mantra in the days and weeks following Sidney Poitier’s 1963 Oscar win, resonate with remarkable clarity. Listeners accustomed to contemporary autobiographical titles should be forewarned that they are entering unapologetic gothic territory akin to that of Eudora Welty (a friend and mentor to Sessums) or even Flannery O’Connor. Raw human emotions of love and hate play starring roles, refusing to remain mere stage props. Simultaneous release with the St. Martin’s hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 6). (Mar.)

This week Mississippi Sissy is #22 on the Booksense Best Seller List. This is the national best seller list for all the independent bookstores in the country. And it has the added honor of being designated ON THE RISE, a designation Booksense gives to the book that seems to be gaining steam and getting noticed by buyers per the numbers sold the previous week.

Also, I just found out that Sissy went up seven spaces on the New York Times Best Seller List to be published this coming Sunday. It will be #27 up from #34. I still long of it to be in the Top Ten so I’ll keep plugging away. I want to be able to see it in the New York Times Book Review itself since they only print the top fifteen sellers in each category. Thank you all out there for helping me get this far. It’s impossible for me to express fully how much I appreciate your support. Only 12 more places to go before they have to put the name of my book in the Review instead of only putting it online. It would be such poetic justice after the hatchet job they ran when reviewing it. It would be another dream come true. The ultimate dream, of course, is to be #1. Revenge - unlike the meal I just tried to eat here at O’Hare Airport while waiting for my flight to New Orleans - is a dish best served cold.

Today is my 51st birthday and I’m stuck in the airport in Cedar Rapids on this tour trying to get down to New Orleans. We’ve all got our nightmare travel stories so I’ll spare you my latest one. I just hope I get to New Orleans by 10 p.m. tonight. (Update: I made it to New Orleans at 12:43 a.m. and walked into my hotel room at 1:09 a.m.) I left my hotel this morning in Iowa City at 9:30 a.m. Do the math. Though math is the last thing I should be doing today as my years on this earth just added up to, yep, 51. But it’s a blessing. As is this tour. I keep repeating that as my mantra today as the announcements keep being made about our flight not taking off and my missing my connection in Chicago. (Another delay was announced just as I typed that last sentence.)

Let’s see. What’s happened since last I posted. I went to Fairhope, Alabama, to read at Page and Palette bookstore, a wonderful store in a wonderful town on the gulf. Fairhope was founded in the 1890s as a socialist uptopian experiment and it retains its artsy fartsy allure for a certain sort of southerner. The owners of the store there and the people who came to hear me read and buy books could not have been nicer. It’s a beautiful place and I suggest you check it out - and Page and Palette as well - if you’re ever in the vicinity. It’s a very welcoming place.

The next morning I got up to fly to Iowa. It’s my first visit here. As my plane approached the airport in Cedar Rapids, the quilt of farmland laid out beneath me was quite beautiful, the landscape dotted with silos and old farmhouses. Iowa City could not have been lovelier - on lots of levels. The town itself is quaint and funky and the town seems to be a campus since there are so many students roaming around from the University of Iowa located there. I was flattered to be invited to read at Prairie Lights Bookstore since the Iowa Writers Workshop is like a mecca for serious writers and I always fantasized as a young writer about being accepted there. (All you Christianists out there hold your fire - I’m using the word mecca as a figurative compliment.) An old boyfriend of mine, Steve Nelson, went to Iowa Workship and lived in Iowa for a while and I couldn’t help but think of him when I landed here. Steve came out of the closet in the early 1990s when he arrived in New York City. I was one of the first men with whom he’d ever been physically intimate. He was an amazing playwright who was influenced by Albee and Beckett. He died of AIDS before his 30th birthday, an ending that Albee and Beckett combined could not have written in the tragic absurdity of such a loss. (And no, I didn’t infect him. I didn’t convert to HIV positive until many years later.) I’ve thought of him so much these last two days while here. He was a gentle spirit and so talented and, yes, sexy in that corn-fed way of folks around these parts. I miss him every time I go to the theatre in New York. And I’ve missed him, achingly so, these last 36 hours while I’ve been in Iowa. Thinking of Steve, made me say a prayer this morning for Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow and all the brave souls who are not as famous as they are who are battling all kinds of diseases with dignity and strength. It puts a book tour and Amazon numbers in perspective. (My Amazon numbers, alas, are losing traction but I trust you’ll keep telling your friends to order my book there or keep ordering it yourself - or buying it at your favorite local store - as a gift for other people. That would be the best gift you could give me: giving my book to others.) Speaking of numbers that are more important than those on Amazon, I got my blood work done before my tour started - those who’ve been reading this blog since I started already knew that I’m HIV positive even before I mentioned it above - and my meds are still working, thank God. Literally: thank God. My viral load is still undetectable and my t-cells are up around 700. All the other blood work proved I’m really, really healthy for a now 51 year old man. Each day is a blessing. Though when you’re stuck in an airport on your birthday it’s hard to think of this particular one as such. But it is.

Oh: I had a nice time last night with some of the people who came to my reading at Prairie Lights. I was getting some cash out of a ATM machine when I heard my name called. They asked if I had plans - I didn’t - so we went to a local coffee place and visited. They could not have been nicer to me and fun to hang with so a shout out to Anne and Alan and Rory and Jay. Jay is a great photographer - Google him at Jay Diers - and see his work. He’s got a sexy book out called Raw Youth. Buy it and see some of the local talent he’s discovered here.

I went back to my hotel last night - the Hotel Vetro owned by the Moen Group, a real estate concern run by the goodlooking blonde-headed Bobby Jett, who also came to my reading. A shout out to Bobby. The Vetro is an oasis of chic in Iowa City; it’s beautifully appointed with a great sushi restaurant downstairs. The Vetro had the most comfortable bed I’ve had on my tour so far and I fell fast asleep - the first time I’ve rested well this whole trip - and dreamt of Archie, my dog. Steve Nelson was holding Archie and looking happy and healthy and wholesomely sexy - in the way of all Iowans it would seem - just like he looked the first time I ever laid eyes on him in New York back in those gay ’90s all our own when he waited on me at The Bagel on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, lingering next to me after I ordered scrambled eggs and bacon and I felt my heart race faster the first time I noticed his presence. I can feel it race faster right now remembering that moment. I can still feel his presence. You rest well, too, Steve. Rest well.